“That isn’t the town,” Matt said. The thought came to him as he spoke it, rising out of his fatigue and his sorrow. “The people in this room are the town. We’re the town.”
“Then maybe the town survived after all,” Kindle said.
Maybe it did, Matt thought. Maybe the town would live to see morning.
Part Four
The Harvest
Chapter 25
Traveller
The boy had come a long way.
He had the skinny body of a twelve-year-old, toughened by his time on the road. His eyes were blue, his hair a dusty brown. He wore jeans, a plain white T-shirt loose at the waist, and a fresh pair of high-top sneakers.
He liked the sneakers. Laced tight, they braced his ankles. They felt good on his feet, a second skin.
He rode an expensive Nakamura mountain bike he had found in a store window in Wichita. The bike had grown dusty as he pedaled north on 15, crossing the border from Utah into Idaho. Last night, camped at an Exxon station, the boy had cleaned the bike with a damp rag. He had oiled the freewheel and the brake calipers, the cables and derailleurs. He had tightened the chain and the crank arm and adjusted the bearings. This morning, the small Nak ran like a dream.
The air was cool. The sky was a hard, glassy blue—the color of a marble he had once owned.
The boy wheeled through sagebrush plains where Interstate 84 followed the Snake River, humming to himself, as absentminded as a bird. He liked the way the wind tossed his hair and snapped his T-shirt behind him like a flag.
In eighty days, he had seen a great deal of the country. He had crossed the Mississippi at Cairo, rolled through Arkansas into Texas, and sheltered for three weeks in the empty city of Dallas while storms raged overhead. He had skirted the Mexican border at El Paso and headed north along the Rio Grande, then west again on 1-40 across the Continental Divide.
He had pedaled through the immense deserts of the southwest, landscapes as large and strange as the moon. A cloudburst caught him in Arizona, filling the arroyos, spiking the arid hills with lightning and drenching him before he could find shelter. But he was never ill; he was never tired.
Now he was looking forward to the Salmon River Mountains, some of the most impassable territory in the continental United States—a wilderness of larch and hemlock, cedar and spruce.
At noon, he stopped at a nameless little farm town for lunch. He broke into a gas station cooler and pulled out two bottles of Grape Crush, drank one immediately and saved the second for later. In some towns, like this one, the electricity was still working—the soda was cool, if not icy. In the Handi-Mart next door he found TV dinners still preserved in a working freezer. That was unusual. The freezers didn’t always last without maintenance, even if the electricity was on. The TV dinners were past their best-by date, but only a little. The boy opened one and heated it in the store’s microwave oven. It tasted okay. He drank the second bottle of Grape Crush. It turned his lips purple.
The boy carried some items in a bag attached to the rear of the bike. After lunch, he opened the bag and took out a hat—a khaki bush hat from a hunting-and-fishing store back east. It didn’t fit too well, but it kept the afternoon sun off his face and neck.
He climbed onto his bike and pedaled down the white line, the precise meridian of the empty road. The wheel bearings sang a high, keen note into the silence.
He passed irrigation farms, big Ore-Ida potato plantations gone brown in the absence of humanity, then more sage prairie as he followed the Snake westward.
Near dusk, as he was thinking about breaking camp, the boy came around a slow curve into another tiny road town where a number of trucks and campers had parked in a string. He saw the motion of people among the vehicles.
The boy realized he knew a few things about who these people were and where they were going.
Their presence was troubling. It demanded a decision.
Paths diverged here. One way: the Salmon River Mountains, a last dalliance before he went Home. The other way: a less certain future.
It was perhaps not an accident that he had come across these people.
The boy stood with his bike between his legs, frowning at the choice.
Then he sighed and walked his bicycle to the nearest camper.
The camper was a dusty Travelaire. The rear door was open and an elderly woman sat in the doorway with a book across her knees. She wore a baggy cotton print dress and a blue quilt jacket over it. Her hair was gray and sparse. She was reading by the light of the low sun, squinting at the ricepaper pages of a King James Bible.
She looked up at the tick of the Nakamura’s oiled bearings. The boy stopped a yard away. He stood beside his bicycle gazing at her.
She gazed back.
“Hello,” she said at last.
Cautiously, the boy said, “Hi.”
She set the book aside. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“I was riding this way. From the east.”
“Are you alone?”
He nodded.
“No mother? No father?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh. Well, that’s too bad.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Nowhere in particular.”
“Are you hungry?”
It had been hours since lunch. He nodded.
“I have some food,” the woman said. “Fresh eggs and cured beef. And a little stove to cook it over. Would you care to join me?”
“All right,” the boy said.
He followed her into the camper. There was a propane stove inside. She lit it and put a skillet over the flame. The camper began to warm up. The day had been sunny and fairly nice, but nights were cold this time of year. The boy looked forward to sleeping inside.
He looked around the camper while she cooked. There wasn’t much to see. A few books, including the dog-eared Bible. A stack of scrapbooks that must have soaked up water at some time in the past—the covers were round, the pages wrinkled. Some clothes, unwashed. He sat at a small table, the folding kind.
Eggs sizzled in the skillet. The woman hummed a tune. The boy recognized it. It was an old song. “Unforgettable.” Nat King Cole made that one famous.
Long time ago.
He waited while she said grace, then tucked into a plate of scrambled eggs. “Here’s the salt,” the woman said. “Here’s pepper. I’m boiling water for coffee. Do you drink coffee?”
He nodded, mouth full.
“I suppose I’ll have to introduce you around.” She picked at her own eggs. “We’re a travelling group. We’re going east. There are other people east. We’re from Oregon. The coast. There was a terrible storm, and then—oh, but it’s a long story. You can hear it all later. Tell me, are you tired?”
“A little.”
“You must have come a long way on that bicycle.” He nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “I’ll introduce you tonight. There’s a meeting. Sort of a town meeting. If you call us a town. We can leave early if you like, but I think people will want to know you’re here… My Lord, I don’t even know your name! Pardon my manners. I’m Miriam. Miriam Flett. And you are—?”
“William,” he said.
“William—?”
“Just William.”
“Misplaced your last name?”
He shrugged.
“Well. I’m pleased to meet you anyway, William. And I’m sure everyone else will be, too.” She took a delicate bite of eggs, eating slowly, old-lady style. “It won’t be troublesome,” she said. “There are only ten of us. Well, eleven, including that Colonel Tyler.”
Chapter 26
Election
Beth Porter shook the boy’s hand and gazed a moment at his wide blue eyes.
They were strange eyes for a kid that age, Beth thought. Too… something. Calm? Calm but observant.